Supreme Court Rejects Challenge on ‘One Person One Vote’

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A voter at a precinct in Pontiac, S.C., for South Carolina’s Democratic primary in February. A Supreme Court ruling on Monday upheld the “one person, one vote” principle.CreditCreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that states may count all residents, whether or not they are eligible to vote, in drawing election districts. The decision was a major statement on the meaning of a fundamental principle of the American political system, that of “one person one vote.”

“We hold, based on constitutional history, this court’s decisions and longstanding practice, that a state may draw its legislative districts based on total population,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court.

As a practical matter, the ruling mostly helped Democrats and upheld the status quo.

But until this decision, the court had never resolved whether voting districts should contain roughly the same number of people or the same number of eligible voters. Counting all people amplifies the voting power of places that have large numbers of residents who cannot vote legally — including immigrants who are here legally but are not citizens, illegal immigrants and children. Those places tend to be urban and to vote Democratic.

Had the justices required that only eligible voters be counted, the ruling would have shifted political power from cities to rural areas, a move that would have benefited Republicans.

The case concerned a clash between two theories of representative democracy. One seeks to ensure “representational equality,” with elected officials tending to the interests of the same number of people, whether they are voters or not. The other tries to ensure that only those who have political power in the form of a vote control the government.

Justice Ginsburg sided with the first theory. “Nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates — children, their parents, even their grandparents, for example, have a stake in a strong public-education system — and in receiving constituent services, such as help navigating public-benefits bureaucracies,” she wrote in her majority opinion. “By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation.”

The decision was more notable for what it did not do than for what it did. As Justice Ginsburg noted, “all states use total population numbers from the census when designing congressional and state-legislative districts.”

The case came from Texas, which counts everybody, but officials there had asked the court to give state lawmakers the option of using different criteria.

The Supreme Court did not decide whether other ways of counting were permissible. “We need not and do not resolve whether, as Texas now argues, states may draw districts to equalize voter-eligible population rather than total population,” Justice Ginsburg wrote.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined her opinion. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. voted with the majority but did not adopt its reasoning.

A crucial aspect of Justice Ginsburg’s opinion, said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, was its “refusal to give Texas the green light to use total voters if it wants in the next round of redistricting.”

“The court simply put the issue off for another day,” Professor Hasen said. “It is hard to stress enough what a victory this is for liberal supporters of voting rights.”

Only Justice Thomas said he would have allowed states to draw districts based on eligible voters if they wished to.

“The Constitution does not prescribe any one basis for apportionment within states,” Justice Thomas wrote. “It instead leaves states significant leeway in apportioning their own districts to equalize total population, to equalize eligible voters or to promote any other principle consistent with a republican form of government.”

“The Constitution leaves the choice to the people alone — not to this court,” Justice Thomas added.

Many political scientists say there are practical obstacles to counting only eligible voters, a point Justice Alito echoed. “The decennial census required by the Constitution tallies total population,” he wrote. “These statistics are more reliable and less subject to manipulation and dispute than statistics concerning eligible voters.”

The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940, was a challenge to voting districts for the Texas Senate brought by two voters, Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger. They said their votes were worth less than those of voters in districts with large numbers of people ineligible to vote.

The plaintiffs were represented by the Project on Fair Representation, a small conservative advocacy group that successfully mounted an earlier challenge to the Voting Rights Act. The group is also behind a pending challenge to affirmative action in admissions at the University of Texas at Austin.

Edward Blum, the group’s president, said he viewed Monday’s decision as a disappointment but perhaps only a temporary setback. “The issue of voter equality in the United States is not going to go away,” he said in a statement.

Attorney General Kenneth Paxton Jr. of Texas expressed only satisfaction with the ruling, though it did not adopt the entire position his office had advanced.

“We are pleased with the unanimous decision of the court,” he said in a statement. “My office is committed to defending the Constitution and ensuring the state legislature, representing the citizens, continues to have the freedom to ensure voting rights consistent with the Constitution.”

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that government lawyers were pleased with the court’s ruling, saying that “generally speaking, it’s consistent with the arguments that the government has made” about redistricting.

A 1964 Supreme Court decision, Reynolds v. Sims, ruled that voting districts must contain very close to the same number of people. But the court did not say which people counted.

“Little attention has focused on the population base jurisdictions must equalize to meet the ‘one person one vote’ demand,” Justice Ginsburg said on Monday in announcing her opinion from the bench.

In his concurrence, Justice Alito said the court should have avoided addressing the “very difficult theoretical and empirical questions about the nature of representation” presented by the case.

“For centuries, political theorists have debated the proper role of representatives, and political scientists have studied the conduct of legislators and the interests that they actually advance,” he wrote. “We have no need to wade into these waters in this case, and I would not do so.”

“Whether a state is permitted to use some measure other than total population is an important and sensitive question that we can consider if and when we have before us a state districting plan that, unlike the current Texas plan, uses something other than total population as the basis for equalizing the size of districts,” Justice Alito wrote.